Working remotely from the office

Confessions from a remote worker who missed the “office”

I’ve been working remotely since the pandemic. Actually, that was a few months before the first lockdown, when I started collaborating with a different team, in the same company, but from a different city. I was the only person from the team in Joinville, so it made sense to stay at home.

Before deciding not going to the office anymore, late in 2019, I had questions on how productive I could be not working from an office. But after March 2020, there was no going back, specially after I started working with US-based companies. So basically, I had to learn how to handle distractions, procrastination and other variables you have when you’re at work and at home at the same time. That’s the Schrödinger Software Engineer cat: you’re both at home and at work, until you close the laptop.

My first impressions on working remotely? The best possible: no traffic, more hours of sleep, more flexibility to handle personal things. I’m not an introvert, so being surounded by lots of people was never a concern, but I must admit that spending more time with people I love and not having to meet inconvinent people for hours is a benefit that only remote work could provide.

But throughout these years, two things made me reconsider working from home all the time: not having contact with people who work in the same industry and the birth of the cuttest in this world, a lil girl called Antonella.

Even though I work with other software engineers on daily basis, the working environment is not always the best place to spend time talking about things that are not related to your daily work. And that makes sense. There are deadlines, production incidents, problems to solve, meetings to attend, pressure to ship things… Well, it’s hard to schedule a meeting in the middle of all that just hangout and talk about relevant things in tech, but that are not relevant to the most urgent need. And setting up another Zoom call for that? Nah, thanks.

So that was the first thing I missed: talking about all-things-software, but not in the middle of the rush of every day life of work. Talking to fellow engineers, hearing about their experiences, having the chance to ask questions about how they solve problem A or B in their companies, that was the kind of conversation that I was missing.